Processing

The manufacturing process is composed by the following stages: saw-sectioning, rough-hewing, vapour-bathing and drying.

Saw-sectioning: Trunks are cut into cylindrical logs according to mercantile lengths.

While rough: hewing logs into the required workpieces one must take heed of the fact that wood isn’t a faultless material, but much more like a “living” one, so to speak: thus hewing could not be performed by machines, which cannot make out its characteristic marks, but must be done by the craft of man, who’s the only one able to cut it fitting closely to the outline it has to bear, and yet to remove faults or flaws.

Vapour-bathing: workpieces are closed in a water-tight room into which is introduced vapour, which in its turn gradually passes through the wood and therefore takes acids and nitric compounds away, that are the main agents of wood’s rottening and sensitivity to damp.

Drying: now workpiece-ends are smeared with a paraffin film and stored in special drying-stoves. Desiccation acts on the wood pores (the peculiar ducts also called trachee), causing them to shrink progressively until they become almost completely obstructed. This provides for a notable slow-down in the eventual absorption of new moisture. Indeed moisture may still penetrate as deep as 5-10 mm,but it’s no longer capable to impair the material, which, once put into production, will be preliminarily “scrubbed” on a lathe and then put into the hands of a carver during the ultimate shaping of shoe models. At this time the wood is inalterable. The whole manufacturing process requires 8-10 months. If this process is forced it may lead to invisible cracks inside, a problem that can come out at the moment of shaping.